The Niagara News is the community newspaper of Niagara College located in Welland and Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada. It is created and produced by the students of the Niagara College Journalism program.

A used textbook can make the world better

No matter where a student goes to school, they should always have the materials they need to study.

Regardless of their geographic or economic status, whether it’s donating textbooks to East Africa, or reselling the books to Canadian students, everyone has the right to learn.

The Heart and Stroke Foundation and Textbooks for Change (T4C) are launching a new initiative that donates textbooks of all kinds to support local and global education.

The initiative donates 50 percent of textbooks to six post-secondary East African university libraries, including Moi University and Pwani University in Kenya.

Some universities don’t have many books. Sometimes their books are too damaged, or they don’t have the correct literature.

The founder of T4C is Chris Janssen, a Western University student. He noticed how often textbooks weren’t used with different programs. When lecturing in East Africa, Janssen saw a lack of useable textbooks. As of 2013, the T4C initiative was established and the saying, “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure,” was more than just a saying.

“I have to thank everybody who sent these books to us because they are very much valuable. Frankly speaking, 90 per cent plus of the books cannot be found here. So you understand what it means to the people here,” says Wubshet Bekalu, dean of School of Commerce at Addis Ababa University, in Ethiopia.

Not only does T4C send textbooks to universities, but they also give $1 from every donated textbook to The Heart and Stroke Foundation and resell 20 per cent of the textbooks at an affordable price to students across North America.

All the textbooks that are out-of-date, damaged or are unusable are properly recycled, to support sustainability and reusing materials to help the environment.

According to the organization’s website, T4C’s goal is to donate one million textbooks by 2020. As of Feb. 8., they have donated 135,000 textbooks to campuses.

Textbooks donated must be for college or university and must have been published in the past 15 years.

T4C cannot accept high school textbooks from before the year 2000, or entertainment texts. These books are not useable for the schools.

The textbooks can be dropped off at either Niagara College campus at the Student Administrative Council (SAC) office and at Brock University’s Student Life and Community Experience office. Or at the local Heart and Stroke Foundation Niagara office in St. Catharines.